Hi welcome to the Eev Blog an Electronics Engineering Video blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics design. I'm your host Dave Jones and I'm here with Bart from Ccope. he's the designer there Yeah I'm I Make Cleos Scopes and I Love your blog Dave It's a beautiful blog. It's tells me a hell lot of good stuff.

Well we make tell us about the Ccope. Well I can take one here and pull it out. Yep and uh, it's a little toy. It's it's a PC scope.

so it's it's. going against Pico scope and all those other little Scopes Um, this is what it looks like. Yep, it's a pretty, uh, you know, average sort of plastic case. but hell it works.

Yep, uh, if you open it, you can see inside it. we have Hardware We have a tear down here. We go. here's inside: tear down at Dave's Blog Live at Electronics You beta and that's inside the Ccope.

Is this the H I Assume there would have been several Generations there have been a few Generations Yep, there have been and this is the current one. except that one's probably a bit bodgy because it's got development stuff inside it. I right? Okay, no it's not too bad. No, it's not too bad.

This is the ethernet version. Yep, so you can see there's the ethernet board. Yep, hang on. let's uh, put it down on the table.

Here we go and uh, tell us about the Uh Hardware I'll zoom in. We can do that. Yeah, so this is the digitizer. Yep, and we we do them in 10, 12, and 14 bits.

So this is a 14bit digitizer. Yep This is all the analog stuff and over here we have DC offset which is so that we can look at just a small chunk of range like 2.1 to 2.2 volts. yep and digitize across just that. Chun Right over here we have our mix signal input.

eight digital ins. Yep, not too many PC Gs do that. Yep, and uh, over here is N Tia Cyclone Magnificent device. That's where all the Magic's running.

That's all the magic and we can change it. Yep, and people can go and upgrade their hardw in the field later on. Fantastic memory. Know SD ram.

It's got a couple what is it? Eight? It's me sample memory, but it's not high sample rate this one. It's only 100 me samples so it's pretty slow. But when you got a 14bit converter, exactly, that's that's the magic. Plus you got you got a trigger that can capture almost anything.

Excellent. Anyway, well yes, not not that you're biased or anything. No, no, that's all right. But you got to talk.

Magnificent device. List: the Wizet chip I don't know if you come across those Hardware Hardware EET and then here's a Sig Gen which is a little using a little um, little Analog Devices DDS chip right. just suits us down to the ground. As you can see, there's a bit of power supply.

that's Bob's Jko aluminum case to stop the stuff. Bad stuff getting in and Sh we have it. Excellent! Thank you for the tear down. The interface is uh Lab view it's La view.

yeah it's all built in La View: you can see the LA viewy sort of controls y y uh but you know we we we have lots of Windows here one of these. This one over here is actually not one of ours. it belongs to Mat Lab right? That's cuz we were piping through staff to Met lab until I pulled the ccope off the rack and stopped from working. Uh, we had mixed signal as I say and uh we we can decode protocols.

well we can. Yep, not today. we can't it's waiting for something right? That's all right I'm sure it does it. Why does it happen anyway I I Bugget it up y So uh yeah we we've got this graph here.

This this waveform display which is mixed signal and it can decode protocols in real time usually. and we have a a maths graph which you can spend math equation to. Yep it's very complicated but does that do serial decoding in the hardware? It does. It does right in the Fpga in the Fpga Excellent.

So that means you can do triggering and stuff like that which is what you want. Okay, we have some signal information. uh we can do Spectra Yep, uh and uh lots of other things. Lots of other stuff.

So the clever scope is pretty clever. moderately. Love this stuff. Tell us history.

Okay, the history. Yeah, well you know I'm an engineer Engineers Love Scopes crows I Think you call them crows, don't they? That's right. Well you see the the problem is that I I wanted to make a crow like almost anyone else out there who wants to make a crow. and I noticed that that, uh, the cell phone business that generated all these really fast analog to digital converters and Fpgas.

Those two together. Magic. you got a scope. That's what you have to do, don't you? Well, what else was I going to do I made a scope just like I I designed my own scope back in 93 got it published in electronics Australia it was extremely popular storage scope.

you know cuz back then you could design your own. It was worthwhile. you could. Yeah, you could.

Market was flooded with all the Chinese Yeah well they've come along. that's right. So so started the business just from home. Was it a side business at the time? Yeah it was a side business business.

You had a real day job I had a real day job which was quite tough and after a while I decided I've done enough in that now you know 10 years or whatever it was I'm going to do a new thing. So this came along on the side and so how long did it take from when you started it? Do business? How long did it? About a year? About a year. then you went fulltime. Then we went fulltime and and got a few other guys and now we're selling Scopes all over the world.

How many how many Scopes have you sold? You know? about 8,000 About 8,000 Yeah, something like that out of New Zealand out of New Zealand New Zealand New Zealand Can you say sucks? Six six and it's still so. This is. uh, there's been several sever there been several Generations That's right we we. We had an earlier one which was USB one based and had an older older Fpga.

It was a bit slow and we couldn't fit enough stuff into it. so of course we had to make a new one and uh yeah, so this is. We got a new one coming after this but it's not released yet but might get there eventually. You still only got the one.

Have you got one model? or have you got several model? We really only have one model. You know we make variations on it, but there's one model. Choice is too hard. it is.

It's much too hard if there just one. That's yeah, but the next one that will have lots of variation. Okay, yeah, well. digitally, it's isolated channels I Don't know if that interests you at all.

Yes, isolation is is Big between individual channels between individual channels as well as the PC. Absolutely well. once you've got the individual channels, you don't need the or is the USB isolated as well. On here, the USB is not isolated and on the next one, the USB is also not isolated cuz it's USB 3 and USB 3 is even harder to isolate than USB 2.

Are you running that at the full USB 3? Yes. Through Spe. 5 gbits per second, 5 GB per second. it's going pretty fast.

Nice. So you got that prototype we're getting. We're coming along. Yeah, yeah, so so but the the isolation is is uh, aimed at uh, people who want make motor control drives and UPS's and power supplies and all that sort of stuff.

How many channels that going to be Four four? Yes, I was say when you go isolated you need four People typically want to monitor quite a few quite a few items, so that's awesome. Is that Is that going to be? Uh, reasonably priced. Does it? Does it up the price? It does up the price a lot because because you You' then got to somehow isolate all that data and have a have a clock that that gets its way around the place. Yeah it.

UPS the price. What? What's the sample? that? um that will be the we're doing it in two versions: The The lower version was 250 Mega sample. still pretty slow 16 bits though. 16it bits fantastic and and 25 KV per microc.

uh comma mode? No, you know what we want and the other one is 5 gbits per second. based on that that E2v converter, right? Five? Excellent. Yeah, but you've got the high, but you're using the USB three to get the data throughput. Yes, you need.

So even though it's only a couple of mix samples a couple hundred, it's only in the order of hundreds of mix samples. Yeah, we want Usb3 cuz we want to increase. We can currently stream at 1 and a half Mega samples or 3 mega samples per second. and we'd like to stream faster than that to hard disk.

How how fast can you possibly how fast will you be able to stream your think over I Have no idea that's an exp. You know, drives themselves have have speed limits. Yeah, well, because and it won't be a consistent consistent latency either, will it with USB No, Like fire wire gives you a consistent uh you. Basically it's packetized and and so as long as the your average packet rate is is Right suitable, you're okay up.

All right. Would the limitation be storing to hard drive these days? Would you need a solid state? You would need A If you want to go really fast, you will need one of them. You will. That's right.

Yes, I mean I mean the one in my little laptop here I think can only handle about 40 megab per second. 40 megabytes per second. It's not that much. Really, Exactly excellent.

So we got some interesting. We have got lots of interesting stuff coming and how many people do you employ now? Um, it's not large now I Can imagine It's a sort of a six-man company, pretty tiny that's pretty good doing well. And where's it made? Oh, it's made in Oakland of New Zealand New Zealand But we'll claim it to be Australian because that's what we do. That's what you do.

Russ Australian do everything good that comes out of New Zealand we claim is Australian so he's from Australia Brilliant!.